Customers of a small business are no less demanding that of larger enterprises. Thus, speed and efficiency of delivery of services and projects is critical competing strategy for small business owners. You simply cannot overlook this aspect of your business.
Having 24 hours in-house operation is critical but it may not be an option that looks feasible due to operational constraints. “Follow the Sun” model of outsourcing is one tool that you can consider for having a 24×7 operations.
What’s “Follow the Sun” Model ?
The follow the sun model of outsourcing is aimed at creating a 24 hour virtual workday for your organization. In this model when the operations of one center goes off, the other center take over the responsibility for the next shift. Thus, for your customers it means that your organization is online 24 hours a day.
In theory this model creates continuous stream of production and cut down the calendar days required to deliver the project or product. I have discussed two hypothetical scenarios in which you can benefits from it:
24X7 Technical Support
If you are ISV, then you must need to provide support to your customers regularly. Spending too much time in dealing with support issues will deviate your attention from more important activities like feature enhancement or planning new products. On the contrary, not providing support timely will mean loss of credibility and rapport.
Using the Follow the Sun model, you can have your support staff located right here using our Dedicated Hiring Model. At the end of each day, you can compile a list of support issues and send it over to your team over here. While you are asleep, the team works and attends to all the support requests.
Thus, you can offer your customer guaranteed support within 24 hours.
24 Hours Update
How often do you clients send you bug-lists or requests that needs to be delivered the next day? If not much, do you think your clients will be impressed if you were able to do this? you bet !
If you are running a small IT services company then chances are you are programmer-entrepreneur or you have fully occupied technical staff who are already overburdened with work. How do you deliver great service to your customers in this scenario ? Answer is pretty simple: Follow the Sun!
If you have a dedicated team then you can simply let then handle these urgent bug fixes or updates and deliver them to your clients the very next day. This team can also work with your project team to shorten the calendar days that is required to finish a piece of work.
The “Follow the Sun” model has been used by large businesses since a long time now. They have mastered the operational issues involved in the process. Thus, we did not invent “follow the sun”, what we have done is that we have brought the same advantage to small businesses. Starting from the organization structure, policies, processes and prices, everything in our organization has been designed to effectively serve SMBs effectively and efficiently.
